Friday, 12 September 2008

The Dave Robicheaux novels of James Lee Burke

G'day, it's your mate Jack Russell here again. Well I just got back from seeing the quack. Had me general checkup as well as the blokes special one in the trouser department. You know what that involves and if you're getting to be a codger like me, well you make sure you get one too. And there's no need to feel embarrassed or anything. The quack takes it in his stride because they're trained for it, and they cop a few quid as well. After all it's nothing compared to what the missus has to put up with. And it might mean you'll get a few more years of fishing you hadn't counted on, so that's a bonus. Here is some more information if you're interested.

Now listen, this bloke James Lee Burke is the dinkum oil and you can take my word on it. Why don't I start by quoting a few reviews.

"He writes explosively about crime and elegaically about America. And he does so with style and passion enough to turn admirers into addicts. Burke is the only author guaranteed to make me bolt meals and lose sleep. No one else in the business is writing fiction like this." Literary Review

"No one handles complex plots better than Burke; no one is better at creating characters, good, bad or evil and above all no one writes with such a sensuous appreciation of life, with so poetic yet meticulous observation of detail." London Evening Standard.

He's a yank writer but don't let that stop you because he's one of the best. That reminds me of the visiting Texan that Granddad Russel was taking for a ride around the property one day.
"So how big exactly is this here spread of yours Mr Russell?" says Tex.
"Well you'd have to ride all day to get to the boundary", says Pa.
"Hell" says the big feller, "On my spread I could ride all day and never reach the boundary".
"Yeah" says Pa, "I had a horse like that once".

Anyway back to the author review. The setting is Louisiana so the tucker is Cajun, and if you haven't tried it, you should get the Missus to cook some up. Or better still give it a go yourself because it's easy to cook - being based on barbecuing, smoking, grilling and one pot stews. All the stuff a bloke can cook, and the way JLB describes it, will have you licking your lips for some. Ingredients like fried oysters and shrimp in Poor boy sandwiches, that's what the yanks call prawns as you may know. As well as wild caught trout and redfish and hunted game, and catfish which they say can be an acquired taste, it's all stuff a bloke would recognise and know how to handle. Just skin 'em or scale 'em, gut 'em, chuck on some seasoning and on the barbie or in the smoker they go, no worries.

Now if you really get into these books you'll want to listen to some Cajun music as well and good stuff it is too. In fact Jolie Blon's Bounce illustrated here in one such. You might remember the live version by the Sir Douglas Quintet, an innovative late 60s band that incorporated Tex-Mex and Cajun styles into rock music, the Mendocino album is here in the shed somewhere, well worth a listen.

But it's not just tucker because the way JLB describes the swamps, the insects, the heat, the sunsets and sunrises, the smells of mud and rotting vegetation, the behaviour of fish and animals, there's fishing action too - you feel like you're right there and once that happens, well you're really reading. In fact the setting is so powerful in these stories that it becomes like another character that controls all others, bit like the drought does to us farmers and graziers.

Now the protagonist, that's the hero, is a feller name of Dave Robicheaux , he's a French Cajun and they're a people with a fascinating history. He's also a recovering alcoholic, a police detective, and a man with his own inner demons, and we've all had them at one time or another. And he's a bloke for whom the ghosts of the past are always present, which is a pretty accurate way of looking at life I reckon. Like when I'm replacing some old eaten out timber fence posts that granddad Russell split with his own hands and the sweat of his brow, or come across the lonely grave of some old fossiker out in the bush and it gives a feller pause to think.

Anyway Dave writes in the first person and you know how I like that in a book. But JLB has a way of overcoming the limitations of this style by slipping in linking passages of third person narrative that are so natural you don't even realise that it's not Dave talking. And if you're a student of language, well the dialogue is pure gold. And he can write a sentence too. But it's time I stopped rabbiting on and we hear from the man himself. This is from the opening of Jolie Blon's Bounce where he first meets Legion, his nemesis in several stories.

"Farther down Main were Hopkins and Railroad Avenues, like ancil­lary conduits into part of the town's history and geography that people did not talk about publicly. When I went to the icehouse on Saturday af­ternoons with my father, I would look furtively down Railroad at the rows of paintless cribs on each side of the train tracks and at the blowsy women who sat on the stoops, hung over, their knees apart under their loose cotton dresses, perhaps dipping beer out of a bucket two Negro boys carried on a broom handle from Hattie Fontenot's bar. I came to learn early on that no venal or meretricious enterprise ex­isted without a community's consent. I thought I understood the nature of evil. I learned at age twelve I did not. My half brother, who was fifteen months younger than I, was named Jimmie Robicheaux. His mother was a prostitute in Abbeville, but he and I were raised together, largely by our father, known as Big Aldous, who was a trapper and commercial fisherman and offshore derrick man. As children Jimmie and I were inseparable. On summer evenings we used to go to the lighted ball games at City Park and slip into the serving lines at barbecues and crab boils at the open-air pavilions. Our larceny was of an innocent kind, I suppose, and we were quite proud of our­selves when we thought we had outsmarted the adult world. On a hot August night, with lightning rippling through the thunder-heads over the Gulf of Mexico, Jimmie and I were walking through a cluster of oak trees on the edge of the park when we saw an old Ford au­tomobile with two couples inside, one in the front seat, one in the back. We heard a woman moan, then her voice mount in volume and inten­sity. We stared openmouthed as we saw the woman's top half arch back­ward, her naked breasts lit by the glow from a picnic pavilion, her mouth wide with orgasm.
We started to change direction, but the woman was laughing now, her face sweaty and bright at the open window. "Hey, boy, you know what we been doin'? It make my pussy feel so good. Hey, come here, you. We been fuckin', boy," she said. It should have been over, a bad encounter with white trash, probably drunk, caught in barnyard copulation. But the real moment was just be­ginning. The man behind the steering wheel lit a cigarette, his face flar­ing like paste in the flame, then stepped out on the gravel. There were tattoos, like dark blue smears, inside his forearms. He used two fingers to lift the blade out of a pocketknife. "You like to look t'rew people's windows?" he asked. "No, sir," I said. "They're just kids, Legion," the woman in back said, putting on her shirt. "Maybe that's what they gonna always be," the man said. I had thought his words were intended simply to frighten us. But I could see his face clearly now, the hair combed back like black pitch, the narrow white face with vertical lines in it, the eyes that could look upon a child as the source of his rage against the universe. Then Jimmie and I were running in the darkness, our hearts pound­ing, forever changed by the knowledge that the world contains pockets of evil that are as dark as the inside of a leather bag. Because my father was out of town, we ran all the way to the icehouse on Railroad Avenue, behind which was the lit and neatly tended house of Giro Shanahan, the only man my father ever spoke of with total ad­miration and trust. Later in life I would learn why my father had such great respect for his friend. Giro Shanahan was one of those rare individuals who would suffer in silence and let the world do him severe injury in order to pro­tect those whom he loved."
So don't let me hear you say you can't find a thing to read, because this stuff is pure 20w50 multigrade, so get down to your local public library pronto and check the shelf under crime fiction - Burke, James Lee, you won't regret it. So it's cheers from your old mate Jacko until we meet again.

Faces In The Street by Henry Lawson

They lie, the men who tell us for reasons of their own
That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;
For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet
My window-sill is level with the faces in the street
Drifting past, drifting past,
To the beat of weary feet
While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.

Clancy of the Overflow by Banjo Patterson

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of betterKnowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,Just `on spec', addressed as follows, `Clancy, of The Overflow'.

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:`Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are.'

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of ClancyGone a-droving `down the Cooper' where the Western drovers go;As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet himIn the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingyRay of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty cityThrough the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattleOf the tramways and the 'buses making hurry down the street,And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt meAs they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal --But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of `The Overflow'.

Green Eye of the Little Yellow God

The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God

by J Milton Hayes

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,There's a little marble cross below the town;There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

He was known as "Mad Carew" by the subs at Khatmandu,He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,And the Colonel's daughter smiled on him as well.

He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,The fact that she loved him was plain to all.She was nearly twenty-one and arrangements had begunTo celebrate her birthday with a ball.

He wrote to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew; They met next day as he dismissed a squad;And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would doBut the green eye of the little Yellow God.

On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance, And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars:But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,Then went out into the night beneath the stars.

He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,And a gash across his temple dripping red;He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day,And the Colonel's daughter watched beside his bed.

He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through; She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;He bade her search the pocket saying "That's from Mad Carew,"And she found the little green eye of the god.

She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;But she wouldn't take the stone and Mad Carew was left aloneWith the jewel that he'd chanced his life to get.

When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,She thought of him and hurried to his room;As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy airOf a waltz tune softly stealing thro' the gloom.

His door was open wide, with silver moonlight shining through; The place was wet and slipp'ry where she trod;An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,'Twas the "Vengeance of the Little Yellow God."

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,There's a little marble cross below the town;There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

A dramatic monologue written by J Milton Hayes, 1911

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Thomas Gray. 1716–1771

THE Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,The plowman homeward plods his weary way,And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,And all the air a solemn stillness holds,Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'rThe moping owl does to the moon complainOf such as, wand'ring near her secret bow'r,Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The Lotos Eaters by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1832

CHORIC SONGIThere is sweet music here that softer fallsThan petals from blown roses on the grass,Or night-dews on still waters between wallsOf shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.Here are cool mosses deep,And thro' the moss the ivies creep,And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep."